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College: An Elegy

Brain fried on the same skilletthat leaves both eggs and seniors scrambled,ambling from bar-wench to bookworm,from drink to drivel, trying to make some sense of afour-year period that gave as many mental cramps ascircular songs of minstrel cycles flushed down ourthroats by the ministers of culture until we enjoyed it:the Hymn to Demeter, Beethoven’s Fifthbirthday party (followed promptly by his McKinsey interview).So in the spirit of shedding our ovarian past andwalking on the fragile eggshells of mixed metaphors: Muses,grant me genius and plagiarism, the fruits of bruises,and the wisdom to tell the difference, if there is one.

Odysseus, né Embryo, set out to write the modern epic, fleeingdactylic, old-world incubators—Ithaka, Hannover, Cambridgeshire—for a city forced into daytime dreaming on account of never sleeping.Psych 101. Erikson says we weresomewhere in between in utero and in love, still taking cues fromDisney movies and Hercules, navigatingIntimacy and Isolation like choosing between John Jay and Carmanwould decide the fate of the Trojan War.And speaking of condoms: Genesisor new student orientation, also known as Fetal Alcohol Syndrome,and the four-year hangover that follows. Comedy, tragedy,crime, punishment, pride, prejudice, confessions (half Augustine,half teenage-drama-queen).This just in: Two Hundred Lines into the Aeneid, Misguided YoungstersFind Groundless Feeling of Intellectual Confidence.

Sophomore slump or avian flu or Dante’s inferno, consisting ofex-girlfriends, midterms, and Cartesian crises.(Watch me sprinkle liberally the names of famous people!)There’s a circle of hell reservedfor the pretentious, and I’m sitting in Satan’s sandboxscribing arcs (and ovals) around myself, hissing in the bifurcated tongue of a snake in paradise,sucking on its rattle like a thumb.Here we were tilting at windmills only to findfossil fuels and that the turbines would have poached birds learning how to fly.But stem cells differentiateover hardtimes, and in the lags and valleys, hearts and brains are made, so it’s OK.

Third year, a fleeting sense of competence and belonging. A renaissance. Another birth.Now I understand the Ninja Turtles coming forth from shells toliberate some poor figure from his marble womb. David wasthe offspring of offspring just like us, and wealso carved characters from marbles and jacks.On a sunny day the steps are crawling with little Alma Maters and Thinkers,the Florentine hatchlings of the perennial, born-again wisdom, and I had forgotten thatthe world is vast and wonderful and ovular, and maybe I’ll study abroad and visitMother Europe to spot Easter eggs in the Last Supperor find some chick who chirps like me.Shakespeare the silver-tongued sperm squirms to fertilize society,and we’re still hung up on finding something to pad our résumés,soften the descent of caviar or the decline of Western Civ.Well, guys, the Age of Reason is here—You get enlightenment and you get enlightenment and you get enlightenment!And although the Buddha (or Kant or Bollinger) probably wouldn’t admit it, the moment of orgasm is the perfect time for meditation,for we have earned the right to loaf about and celebrate ourselves,the dung beetles of free, or at least student-discount, verse.Finally impressions and expressions of starry nights on steps and primalscreams leave us with the cool poise of awakened beings. I hope.

Act Four: Chickens.“I need a job,” clucks Søren, pecking a cross out of wood and vaguely trembling,“Quit whining,” crows a cocky Friedrich, gettingbeak from some Kentucky Fried bird.Enter Modern Man, stage right, imposing a rectangular prism on an apple core.A discontented civilization grown in a petri dish is confused about itself,forcing Picasso to etch his profile, head-on, into a broken mirror.Dalí and Einstein team up to demonstrate the floppiness of time.World Wars. Crush parties.Enter Postmodern Man. Staged. Right?The test-tube generation emerges from a dirty ponddemanding paid internships and casual hookups. In my final semester I develop a frantic desire to chronicle my experiencein the style of paint flicked onto a canvas and bicycled over and over and over easy.Our favorite roosters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Are Dead,but we stay sunny-side up remembering that Ithaka is Penelope,and that we’ve seen these Hudson shores before.

So to the fools who worry—remember that for hardships we havespaceships or, even better, friendships thatare unconfined by the expanding cellophane mirage of the universe.And for failure and boredom we have the benedict ofunadulterated wonder, reinventing itself in cracks on the shells of newborn minds,graduating from cylinders to spheres.Behold the human condition strutting its hour on the stage:An idiot can’t tell a tale without breaking a leg,and God can’t make an omelette till he breaks a fucking egg.